What will the CIS look like?

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I'm rather interested in the CIS faction, and got to wondering how it'll play. Personally, I'm hoping for something with a little bit of a different feel from the other, organic-based militaries. A couple ideas I've had so far:

Basic Dials - The droids in the droid army don't exactly seem IG-88-level competent. They are mass-produced to do simple tasks together. Their dials should be pretty simple, without too much trickery in itself.

Tricksy Team-ups - The droid ships should reward commanders who can master their dials. The ships should be relatively weak individually, but get considerably better when allies are nearby. (e.g. an ability like, "When defending, roll X extra dice, where X is the number of allies within Range 1 (max 2)")

Real Swarms - The Buzz Droids are a perfect opportunity to introduce multiple craft on a single base, much like the flotillas in Armada. Given the role they play in the movies, maybe they would attack only at Range 0-1, but not receive any penalty for overlapping other craft. I could even see them being immune to critical hits, as they're a cloud of small droids, and hitting one or two in a vital area isn't going to do much about their overall effectiveness.

These are just speculations, not predictions, of course, and would just be general guidelines, not hard rules for every craft. What are your thoughts? What would you like to see from the CIS?

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I hope they will feel different than the other factions (well that's too be said for every faction)

Also like the idea of swarms. The idea of team ups... not so much. When they start to lose ships, I see them start to crumble. Worried about this producing very one side games, since they will have to dominate to make up for loss of synergy later..

3 Vulture droids to a base, 1 firepower, hull to each. But not 1 agility to each, no. 2 overall because they're still tough targets but far from impossible.

Range one, all three? Each gets a range bonus. Six dice.

But once that's down to a single vulture... It's only rolling 1 dice at you. You only need one hit to kill it.

now multiply that by eight times. That's a lot of firepower. That's a lot of droids to avoid.

So cluster 3 fighters that have nearly the same size foot print as a TIE/LN on a single base.......... Yah, go look the Vulture up on the wiki. 3 hp, on a medium to large base would render them useless....

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Basic Dials - The droids in the droid army don't exactly seem IG-88-level competent. They are mass-produced to do simple tasks together. Their dials should be pretty simple, without too much trickery in itself.

I almost feel like it should be the opposite.

They're droids. They don't have the same limitations on them as organic pilots do. I think they should have some of the weirdest, whitest dials in the game. Lots of hard turns, 2 speed 180 moves, that sort of thing. If you wanted to make the simplistic programming come through, that should probably be more to do with their ability to react to things. So maybe deny them reposition actions and keep them all low initiative? Or instead of all that you could give them something really weird like an optional pre-maneuver 1 hard?

Balancing all that sounds tricky. I worry that any ship with no pilots above I3, say, could struggle to be competitive. But I'd like some acknowledgement that the droids don't have to worry that what they're doing would be turning an organic pilot inside to mush.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Tricksy Team-ups - The droid ships should reward commanders who can master their dials. The ships should be relatively weak individually, but get considerably better when allies are nearby. (e.g. an ability like, "When defending, roll X extra dice, where X is the number of allies within Range 1 (max 2)")

It's maybe difficult to differentiate this from the swarm style play the Imperials like, and the supporting, helpful abilities the Rebels have but I do like the idea of the CIS' hat just being straight force multipliers. A raft of universal, identical abilities that all stack together to grow in power the more ships are around. It's a bit like the geth from Mass Effect - the more there are in close proximity, the more intelligent and effective each unit is.

The example you gave is a decent one, though extra dice is maybe a bit much. Re-roll, for sure.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Real Swarms - The Buzz Droids are a perfect opportunity to introduce multiple craft on a single base, much like the flotillas in Armada. Given the role they play in the movies, maybe they would attack only at Range 0-1, but not receive any penalty for overlapping other craft. I could even see them being immune to critical hits, as they're a cloud of small droids, and hitting one or two in a vital area isn't going to do much about their overall effectiveness.

Buzz Droids have missiles and condition cards written all over them, IMO. A separate mini that you have to deploy at the start like everything else, or even get to deploy from a parent ship just feels clunky to me.

Their delivery system is a missile, we saw that in RotS. It should be in XWM too.

I wonder if you could get charges on a condition card? If so, I'm thinking a condition card like "At the start of each activation phase, you must roll two attack dice. For each crit result rolled, deal one faceup damage card. Action: Spend 1 charge. If this card has no charges, you may discard it." With two charges on it.

That means the Buzz droids are stuck on you for at least two rounds, and you've got spend your action getting rid of them. The action cost for two whole rounds might be a little harsh, but I want to represent the fact that the pilot has to do something to get them off. The trigger could be on fully executing a blue maneuver instead?

I did also think about having the charge spend action also let you perform a barrel roll (you know, trying to literally shake them off) but I figured the interaction with ships that don't have it natively could get a bit weird.

Hmm. Maybe this:

"At the start of each system phase, you must roll two attack dice. For each crit result rolled, deal one faceup damage card. You cannot perform the focus action. After you fully execute a maneuver, you may spend 1 charge. When this card has no charges, or if you receive at least one ion token, you may discard this card. 2 charges"

This represents the pilot having to focus on clearing the droids off his ship, but doesn't stack unfairly with ion (which only lets you perform a focus). It also makes sense from a fluff point of view, because the ion fries the buzz droids.

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So cluster 3 fighters that have nearly the same size foot print as a TIE/LN on a single base.......... Yah, go look the Vulture up on the wiki. 3 hp, on a medium to large base would render them useless....

Cute, when did I mention anything but a small base?

3 hours ago, Dwing said:

The powercreep is real ?. I hope 2.0 never get near 6red die territory, even though Dash can probably go there already. 6 red on a cheap swarm ship would be bonkers.

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The Vulture are small, less than 7 meters, (Delta 7 is 8, A-wing almost 10) and the tri-fighter is even smaller. It will be hard to justify the monetary cost for such small ships, so I would like to see them packaged as 2 or 3 in a pack priced as a medium or large ship.

This could also be an opportunity for FFG to borrow from Star Trek Attack Wing with their fighter squadron rules. Basically they have a set of 3 on a base and their stats change based on the damage dealt.

Vulture Droid: Initiative 2 or 3

2 on a medium base could start off with 6 hull, 3 attack and 2 agility. When they suffer 3 damage, the are now 2 attack and 3 agility.

3 on a large base would be 9 hull, 4 attack and 2 agility and they progress down as above.

This ship is supposed to be fast and should have only red and blue maneuvers(I'm thinking Interceptor dial minus 1 turns) , but have the ability to complete red maneuvers while stressed. Though they don't actually have any difficulty executing the maneuvers, the red is to prevent the actions due to their limited A.I.

Tri-fighter: Initiative 4 or 5

I would go the same basis set up as above, but add an extra agility and add a cannon slot. Since it should have a more advance A.I. give it a system slot as well.

The tri-fighter isn't as fast as the Vulture, but more maneuverable, so A-wing dial with more green minus the 5 straight.

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1. The pilot encountered something very dangerous or fear-inducing, ie. Tried to thread a debris cloud or pulled off a particularly difficult manuever or was shot at by a torpedo that specifically throws shrapnel in every direction.

2. As a game mechanic, stress is also used to prevent players from doing rediculous and game-breaking manuevers turn after turn after turn. (Perpetual zero-stops or k-turns ... Less the cheating Defenders).

Conclusion:

Droid dials could have red manuevers, (like k-turns that are still prevented from doing over and over) but maybe their dial is all BLUE, so they can always clear stress.

Droids would be immune to fear, so effects like flechette torps giving them stress would be mute, I guess, unless the devs wanted to imply that stress to possibly also related to SHIP stress from enduring a hail of shrapnel debris.

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The Vulture are small, less than 7 meters, (Delta 7 is 8, A-wing almost 10) and the tri-fighter is even smaller. It will be hard to justify the monetary cost for such small ships, so I would like to see them packaged as 2 or 3 in a pack priced as a medium or large ship.

...

Vulture Droid: Initiative 2 or 3

2 on a medium base could start off with 6 hull, 3 attack and 2 agility. When they suffer 3 damage, the are now 2 attack and 3 agility.

3 on a large base would be 9 hull, 4 attack and 2 agility and they progress down as above.

This ship is supposed to be fast and should have only red and blue maneuvers(I'm thinking Interceptor dial minus 1 turns) , but have the ability to complete red maneuvers while stressed. Though they don't actually have any difficulty executing the maneuvers, the red is to prevent the actions due to their limited A.I.

Totally agree on the "don't want to spend $20 for a model that small" argument.

Couple issues with the meduim and large base concepts:

1. What about game play feel? Even if they game the flotilla a 1-turn, as they should, it wouldn't feel the same on a med/lrg base.

2. large base would make them not very good at blazing through asteroid fields, which I think we all can agree, these little monsters should be all but immune to obstacle overlap since they're so small and agile.

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Totally agree on the "don't want to spend $20 for a model that small" argument.

Couple issues with the meduim and large base concepts:

1. What about game play feel? Even if they game the flotilla a 1-turn, as they should, it wouldn't feel the same on a med/lrg base.

2. large base would make them not very good at blazing through asteroid fields, which I think we all can agree, these little monsters should be all but immune to obstacle overlap since they're so small and agile.

Maybe a two-model small base would be best?

I do think that if they do multiple models per base, there will likely be some special rules for overlapping.

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Totally agree on the "don't want to spend $20 for a model that small" argument.

Couple issues with the meduim and large base concepts:

1. What about game play feel? Even if they game the flotilla a 1-turn, as they should, it wouldn't feel the same on a med/lrg base.

2. large base would make them not very good at blazing through asteroid fields, which I think we all can agree, these little monsters should be all but immune to obstacle overlap since they're so small and agile.

Maybe a two-model small base would be best?

I wasn't thinking about the maneuverability of the large base. So I agree 2 on a small would be better. I haven't used the medium bases yet, so I don't know how much of a problem having 3 on a medium base would fly.

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I hope the faction feels like, or has a mechanic that really values one or two main crewed command ships, that provide heavy support to large swarms of cheap ships. Like palp/aces, but instead palp/swarm type of thing. I think that would be most thematic.

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I hope the faction feels like, or has a mechanic that really values one or two main crewed command ships, that provide heavy support to large swarms of cheap ships. Like palp/aces, but instead palp/swarm type of thing. I think that would be most thematic.

Like a Droid Command ship/crew... Where in the battle each Droid is given a calculate token at the start of the attack phase as long as the command is still alive.

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For some reason, I suddenly thought of Robo Rally, and imagined something completely ridiculous. Imagine droids only having speed 1 maneuvers, but being assigned three dials per turn. They perform the first at I1, the second at I3, and the third at I5. Probably completely broken, and I have no idea how actions would work, but it certainly would be unique! XD

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It would be nice if focus of this faction would be a generic pilots and to see pilot text (on commanders) such as "All non unique ships at range 1-3 gans [...]" . I also like a Idea of 2 small ships for 25-30$.